A Method To Quantify Residents' Jargon Use During Counseling Of Standardized Patients About Cancer Screening

Main Category: Cancer / Oncology
Article Date: 25 Aug 2008 - 1:00 PDT

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UroToday.com - A report in the Journal of General Internal Medicine by Dr. Lindsay Deuster and colleagues evaluates the ability of residents to communicate with patients about cancer screening - and specifically the use of jargon language during these counseling sessions. Jargon is defined by the authors as "specialized language of a trade, profession, or similar group" that is not easily understood by others. The authors used a communication quality indicator and methods from corpus linguistics in order to quantify jargon usage.

Transcripts of conversations between internal medicine residents and standardized patients, portrayed to have a question about screening for prostate or breast cancer, were abstracted. These transcripts were made from tapes collected during four workshops in a primary care internal medicine residency program. Residents were asked to give informed consent and patients began with a short speech, patterned after an example they were given, to inquire about prostate or breast cancer screening. The final sample for analysis consisted of 86 transcripts (41 prostate cancer and 45 breast cancer). A structured 7-step protocol was used to abstract jargon word lists and evaluate transcripts for explanations of these jargon words.

Patient interviews averaged 10.1 minutes and inter-abstractor reliability was very high. Across 86 transcripts, 350 unique jargon words were identified, with an average of 19.6 unique jargon words per transcript. Most words were used more than once, for an average of 53.6 jargon words used per transcript. No difference was found in jargon word usage, either by resident gender of year in residency. On average, 4.5 explanations per transcript were found. More explanations were found in prostate cancer screening transcripts (5.9) compared to breast cancer (3.2). The average explanation ratio was 0.15, meaning that 85% of jargon was not explained. The 5 most commonly used prostate screening jargon words were prostate, screen, symptom, rectal, and biopsy. The results suggest that the use of jargon words is high in cancer screening, and the prevalence of jargon explanations are low.

Deuster L, Christopher S, Donovan J, Farrell M
J Gen Intern Med. 2008 Aug 1. Epub ahead of print.

Reported by UroToday.com Contributing Editor Christopher P. Evans, MD, FACS

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